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The communal housing in USSR appeared mostly as a result of "working class" (in wide sense, i.e. peasants, workers, low level clerks/bureaucrats) moving into th
by trhway 7y ago
The communal housing in USSR appeared mostly as a result of "working class" (in wide sense, i.e. peasants, workers, low level clerks/bureaucrats) moving into the large and very large apartments (like an apartment taking whole floor of a building) where a "class enemy" (aristocracy, rich and/or high positioned people from pre-Revolution who had emigrated if they were lucky or got killed otherwise as result of the Revolution and the Civil War) lived before. Giving whole such an apartment to a family of a worker would be too much from a social and practical point of view. Also the USSR was supposedly building a worker paradise and communal living was like a virtue as well as a virtue building process.
The new and smaller housing, especially the even smaller mass apartments of Khruschev times almost never was communal except for the cases of very tight hosing situation in the town or some other relatively rare situations.
- heneryville 7y agoGiven that the revolution was in 1917, and how much the working class urbanized following the revolution, I'd have a hard time believing that pre-revolution housing stock was sufficient beyond the first decade. Surely much built-to-suit communal housing must have been made in the 60+ years of communist rule.
- trhway 7y agoI was talking about that USSR specific "kommunalka". And there was another, more traditional, form of communal housing - dormitories - usually associated with specific factories/organizations and which especially took off during industrialization. With time the dormitories became the dominant form of housing pressure resolution. While intended to be temporary some people/families had to live there for years.
- hamilyon2 7y agoNo, gp is right. New-style buildings had other names, like stalinka.